Vieraalla Maalla (In A Foreign Place)

Emilia Moisio’s on-going ‘Vieraalla Maalla (In a Foreign Place)’ photographic project is induced by her personal experiences of cultural misunderstandings that affect the way we perceive images and the world around us. In this fabricated outlandish world, traditional Finnish, Carelian, and Sami customs and practices have been given a slightly odd twist. Not deviating beyond recognisability for recipients with the relevant cultural knowledge, the surreal scenes toy with proverbs, phrases and obsolete customs, rendering the images absurdly strange to a viewer unfamiliar with the cultural heritage. Drawing from personal experiences of cultural alienation and misunderstandings, and the artist’s Carelian origin, the work invites the recipients to strive to decipher and locate the depicted world, thereby denoting the arbitrary nature of our interpretations of images so easily taken for granted.